U2 interview: Bono on death, taxes and their new album Songs of Experience

U2 in concert at TwickenhamDANNY NORTH

Recently, Bono has been worried about how he will be remembered when he dies. “The loss of David Bowie affected me profoundly,” he says. “And Leonard Cohen, who I didn’t know as well as David, but I knew Leonard.” Both singers were given a vibrant sendoff, and the tributes were 99% positive. That won’t happen for Bono. “At your funeral, nobody talks about what you achieved,” he says a little sadly. “They talk about whether you were funny or not. Were you kind to your kids? So I’m moving away from worrying too much about legacy, as regards U2 or my own work, to be more concerned about what my kids and friends think of me.” I met Bono in Sao Paulo last month on the terrace of his hotel, the day after another run-through of the band’s classic album, The Joshua Tree, for their sellout 2017 tour. A woman in the crowd passed out. Models posed for selfies. Owen Wilson was there, in bold floral trousers, singing his sad heart out to With or Without You. Four men thumped the night sky whenever U2 played a hit, which was a lot.

When I mention those men to Bono, he asks if I have met Javier Bardem. That’s how his conversation goes, a verbal rush through Who’s Who. Bardem, he explains, is a “champion air drummer”. He name-drops all the time, from “the Macca” to his “quite close friend” Lena Dunham. The photo below was taken by the supermodel Helena Christensen. He has a cluttered phonebook and a cluttered mind, too: answers come, but take an age to arrive. Dressed in head-to-toe black and tinted specs, it’s as if he has been preserved, not as the punk first famous 37 years ago, but as the strutting, do-gooding rock god of the 1990s. He’s like living, breathing taxidermy.

Two weeks after I met Bono, the Paradise Papers bomb dropped. He was named in them for using a “Malta-based firm to invest in a Lithuanian shopping centre”. It was an accusation of tax dodging against the poster boy for the moralising super-rich.

His spokeswoman insisted there was no wrongdoing, but he was still labelled a hypocrite. I emailed to ask how that felt. “I believe fully in transparency and have no interest in my investments being hidden, in Lithuania, Malta or anywhere else,” he replied. “This investment was in 2006, and my name has been visible to relevant authorities.” He added that he was part of a push in 2013 to give the press access to who owns what, and where. “I didn’t then, and don’t now, want to be complicit in a system that’s got way out of control in terms of its opacity. I think you can be an investor as well as an activist — there is nothing wrong with being a thorn in your own side.”

An attempt at face-saving, then, but this is why Bono’s legacy is far from secure. For non-fans he comes across as a two-faced, sanctimonious chugger. Fans, frankly, don’t care. U2 have played to 2.7m people on this year’s tour, and their popularity and mega-wealth meant that they (and I) fled the Sao Paulo stadium with a police escort, to an upscale hotel they had taken over for their crew and entourage. When we arrived, somehow the bassist Adam Clayton was already pacing the foyer in a flowing kimono.

Bono doesn’t help himself, but you have to admit that his money-raising does good. His (Red) branding exercise, for instance, has produced more than $465m for Aids work in Africa. Some of his tax bill may have been avoided, sure, but with the other hand, he doles out funds to needy causes. It is greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number maths to vex Jeremy Bentham for months.





Yet, however annoying Bono may be, I’ve met enough people desperate to dismiss all his work just because they hated that time an unwanted U2 album turned up on their iTunes. “I pretended in the past that it didn’t hurt my feelings, but it might have,” he says when asked about the public perception of him and his band. “But I don’t think it bothers anyone any more.”

It is telling, then, that I found Bono frail close up. On stage, he is anything but, yet from the cracks in his voice to the stories etched into his skin, he fills all his 57 years. Our meeting occurred before the Paradise Papers were released, but he already seemed spooked. I was not surprised. There are clues about his state of mind in Songs of Experience, U2’s imminent album, their 14th, which has tracks written for those he cares about most: his wife, Ali; his four children; Jesus. It’s the dark lyrics, full of nods to death, that linger.
“I’ve had a few attempted knockout punches,” Bono admits, quiet as a whisper for much of the interview. A serious bicycle crash in 2014 was widely reported, followed by the deaths of Bowie and Cohen. Were they the said punches?

“No, there’s a few things, but I won’t go into them,” he says, before stopping, thinking, picking up again. He does this a lot. “Everyone has a brush with mortality, and I don’t want to get into the soap-opera aspect, but I went, ‘OK, I may not be indestructible.’” He nods when I suggest it was a wake-up call. “A moment to stop and, in that pause, I thought, ‘I’m going to look at mortality and how it affects the way I see my family, friends and faith.’”

To this end, a striking line in the terrific Lights of Home — “Oh Jesus, if I’m still your friend” — is hard to ignore. Did Bono’s brush with death lead him from God? “My curiosity takes me to dangerous places, and I’ve been nonchalant about that,” he admits. “Partly because of my faith, but then I felt that faith go out of reach. It was last Christmas, and I was surprised. Belief is preposterous, but I have it, and I thought, ‘I’m experiencing fear!’

“It was new, and I realised I don’t want to die. I want to spend more time with my kids. There are songs I want to write, stuff I can be useful for. Then, when I admitted I was afraid, my faith returned.”



U2 have never been a subtle band, nor have they ever claimed to be. The bluster and fury of 1980s hits such as I Will Follow still stand up, though their musical power got patchier after Achtung Baby (1991), with its heavy mood and sonic experimentation. By 2004’s vast-sounding Vertigo, the Dublin foursome had become the biggest band on the planet, but their music had become vaguer, epic filler. Songs of Experience is a strong return. With classic skittering guitar from Edge, it is the simplest they’ve been for years.

“You have to watch the lurgy of progressive rock,” Bono smiles, as he cites Carole King’s Tapestry and sings one of his new songs to me as if it were a piano ballad on that album. The band’s current sound, then, is upbeat, but often Bono sounds lost. Depressingly, at one point, he sings: “The end is here.”

It’s not just his personal apocalypse he’s addressing after all; and in tackling the recent liberal apocalypse, his bluntness is really in your face. Take The Blackout, a military stomp with the line “Democracy is flat on its back”, followed by: “Is this an extinction event?” It’s as subtle as burning an effigy of Trump. This summer, a U2 show in St Louis was cancelled due to race riots. How does Bono, a part-time New Yorker, feel the country that gripped him as a child in Dublin changed in 2016?

“People have been acting like something died,” he says. “It is grief. The death of innocence. And my angle is, ‘Good!’ Now you can start. Because we lived with this idea that things would get fairer. Women’s rights. Gay rights. It was just happening. Then it stopped.”

Was it complacency? “Yes,” he says emphatically. “People believed in spiritual evolution by its own hand, but there’s no evidence for this.”

In February, in his second job as a philanthropist, Bono was criticised for a photo op with the vice-president Mike Pence. It didn’t help that he praised the politician for “hitting the ground running”, even if Bono insists he meant that day, after a night flight, not the new administration’s activities in general. Either way, the meeting was odd. Pence’s push for a “global gag” cuts aid to the very women in poverty that Bono’s Poverty Is Sexist campaign seeks to help. Why on earth meet him?

“Mike Pence is a person I believe we can work with,” Bono says. “I may not agree with him, but I believe him when he speaks. I have sympathy for idealists — what you and I might think of as narrow-minded ideological fundamentalists like Pence. If you can widen the aperture of that idealism, they’re capable of being passionate about, say, the environment or poor people. And liberals have got to be careful of that awful dismissiveness of people who have thoroughly conservative views.”

A meeting with Trump, though, isn’t on the cards. “I can’t meet with him because he doesn’t tell the truth. I have good friends in the Republican Party... It’s going to end in tears, and people will be embarrassed that the Oval Office was turned into the WWF.” (He means the wrestlers, not the animal-savers.)

Like Forrest Gump with gumption, Bono has met most of the important politicians of his era. Some strong relationships will remain so. About Aung San Suu Kyi, though — for whom U2 wrote a song — he told me: “Until I speak to her, I don’t want to vocalise too much [about the Rohingya crisis].” He was hoping to phone her and come back to me with his summation of her stance, but she didn’t accept his request for a call, which led to a band statement about blown minds and broken hearts. When he talks about her, though, or America, or his dashed hopes after the Arab Spring, it is clear that much he fought for is collapsing around him.

He mentions a quote from the activist Wael Ghonim: “The power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.” It is beautiful, he says. His voice trembles. “Turned out not to be true.”

The next day, in Edge’s room, U2’s second most famous man is wearing his regulation hat and strumming an electric guitar in front of the TV. It’s a portable studio. Sprightly and sturdy, has he been worried about Bono of late?

“Yeah,” he says solemnly. “When your friend goes through trauma that could’ve been fatal, of course you’re concerned. Clearly, we’re at an age where we have to think about our wellbeing, because when you see so many people — not much older — just dying, it’s like, OK...” He pauses. “You start to put on the safety belts for the first time.”

About Songs of Experience, Edge says “simplicity is where music is at” now, and offers Rihanna’s sparse Anti album as inspiration. “It’s tight,” he says of their new record. “There’s no half-baked ideas.” He’s right: the tunes are much more probity than prog. Which is why the lyrics lend themselves to close scrutiny. One song, You’re the Best Thing About Me, about Ali, Bono’s wife since 1982, has a pained coda of “Why am I walking away?”.

That’s going to cause headlines! Is he prepared? “I am,” the singer says. “But I never wanted to do Ali the disservice of a sentimental song, so I wrote a midlife crisis one instead. It is a portrait of an idiot.” He goes on to explain that he had a nightmare in which he left his family. “I woke and was in tears. I went to the kitchen and got, ‘Ah, poor pet. And you left, did you?’ I’m mocked quite a lot at home.”

Bono, I have to admit, is sweet when he talks about home, maybe because nobody punctures pomposity like loved ones. That is where, in his daughters, Eve and Jordan, he sees hope for the world. “Get out of the f****** way!” he growls approvingly of a united fight he sees in women now, with recent marches and movements. “It’s the most important shift, the rising tide to lift all boats — women.”

As a sign of shifting attitudes, Ireland is set to hold a referendum on abortion. “My daughters are swinging from the rafters,” he says about the vote, planned for next year. “But telling women what to do with their bodies is unacceptable, and I think Irish people know that.” Will he make his voice heard nearer the time? “I don’t know,” he says. “They may not want my placard up there. ‘It’s OK, Bono. We’ve got this one!’”

He laughs. He is way more knowing than critics and satirists give him credit for. Back on U2’s debut album, Boy, Bono sang: “I felt the world could go far/If they listened/To what I said.” I guess he’s been arrogant since he was 20. He finds this funny, saying the line is “lovely, wistful humour — that’s one of the greatest debut albums... that we ever did”. He smiles, thinking back to that prophetic boast of a line. “Yeah,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “How are we doing on that project?”

The terrace has filled with well-wishers. Some try to give Bono a basket of milk products made by oppressed Brazilian women, while a fan with a U2 tattoo really wants him to see her arm. These people will cry when he dies, but what will his wider legacy be? The arena-filling star who aided the world’s ill and poor, or being “that hypocrite” who told people how to behave? A divisive act for divided times.

Noel versus Bono
Last month, Noel Gallagher told me a great story about hanging out with Bono. It featured the U2 singer’s home, a speech by the Irish taoiseach, a private jet, Paris and Gallagher turning on his TV to see Bono talking to President Macron. “I read it,” Bono says, smiling. Gallagher said the three-day session wiped him out. “Well,” Bono says, ”Noel is Irish in all the more inspiring ways, but he is missing that thing we call the ‘hollow leg’. He doesn’t really drink that much. I thought it was a quiet day!” Over to Gallagher: how does he like being called a lightweight?


https://www.thetimes.co.uk

U2 win Global Icon Award at 2017 EMAs

U2, who have now been a formidable force in global music for over 40 years, were deserving winners of the night's award.

Bono and co. received a gushing introduction from actor and 30 Seconds To Mars frontman Jared Leto.

Leto described U2 as the inspiration behind his own band 30 Seconds To Mars, and thanked U2 for their music and "poetry" over the years.

Leto made particular mention of The Joshua Tree, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, as a source of inspiration for him.

U2 had previously performed live from Trafalgar Square in a specially arranged gig that was streamed direct to the main EMA Awards taking place in Wembley.


www.buzz.ie

U2 WINS TOUR OF THE YEAR AT LOS40 AWARDS IN SPAIN

U2 picked up two awards Friday night at the Los40 Music Awards in Madrid. First was the Golden Music Award 2017, a sort of career achievement-type award that was announced earlier this year. The band later picked up a second award, as The Joshua Tree Tour 2017 won for Tour of the Year.
Bono and Adam both gave brief speeches while accepting each award. Bono spoke a bit in Spanish and gave special thanks to U2's Spanish audience. Adam praised U2's crew for the work they do while the band is on tour. They sat at a table with their manager, Guy Oseary, and longtime friend, actor Penelope Cruz.

www.atu2.com

Do you believe in Larry Mullen Jr?

"...On drums, the thunder and lighting of the band, Larry Mullen Jnr - and when he smiles the sun comes out..." Bono on Larry

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BOSS!!!!

Bono on How U2's 'Songs of Experience' Evolved, Taking on Donald Trump

I've always believed in working across the aisle ... but there's a bully on the bully pulpit and silence is not an option," says the U2 frontman


You started this album three years ago when the world was a very different place. How did the chaos of Brexit, Trump and everything else shape the eventual course of the album? Would it have been a very different album had those things not happened?

On the latter part of the question, it's hard to quantify but I would say the emotional temperature is up about 25 percent.

You've spent the past few months playing The Joshua Tree on tour as you put the finishing touches on the album. Has the tour impacted how you thought about Songs of Experience? How?

In truth, there's a couple of reasons why we delayed Songs of Experience. One personal, one political. The world around us was certainly changing out of all recognition, we nearly lost the European Union, something that has helped keep the peace in our region for nearly 70 years. Globalization replaced with localization is somewhat understandable, but the return of hard right views is not to be tolerated. If Marie La Pen had been elected president of France, the whole idea of a European Union would have been vulnerable.
You've had the same sort of disaffection in the United States with the rise of a new kind of constituency, people on the both left and right who have lost faith in political process, the body politic, in political institutions. These sentiments are easily played and manipulated by the likes of Donald Trump. In a world where people feel bullied by their circumstance, sometimes people fall prey to a bully of their own. Lots of people around me, both conservative and liberal, feel that this is one of those defining moments in their life and in the storied life of their country. After the election, some people on the left were almost grieving I'd say and when I try to understand this, I realized there was a kind of mourning, a mourning for innocence that was lost.
For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality and justice for all. The baseness of political debate, the jingoism, the atavistic fervor of Trump's verbiage reminded us that we were dreaming if we thought evolution applied to consciousness. Democracy is a blip in history and it requires a lot of focus and concentration to keep it intact.
"The Blackout," which started off its life about a more personal apocalypse, some events in my life that more than reminded me of my mortality but then segued into the political dystopia that we're heading towards now. "Dinosaur, wonders why it still walks the earth. A meteor promises it's not going to hurt" would have been a funny line about an aging rock star. It's a little less funny if we're talking about democracy and old certainties – like truth. The second verse "Statues fall, democracy is flat on its back, Jack. We had it all and what we had is not coming back, Zac. A big mouth says the people they don't want to be free for free. The blackout, is this an extinction event we see?" goes straight to the bigger picture of what's at stake in the world right now.
There's a song called "Get Out of Your Own Way" where I've tried to use some biting irony to reflect the anger out on the streets "Fight back, don't take it lying down you've got to bite back. The face of liberty is starting to crack, she had a plan until she got a smack in the mouth and it all went south like freedom. The slaves are looking for someone to lead 'em, the master's looking for someone to need him. The promised land is there for those who need it most and Lincoln's ghost says get out of your own way."

Many of your albums were made with either a single producer or the team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Why have you moved towards working with so many different producers on single albums?

Since The Joshua Tree, I don't think we've done an album with less than four producers. Though Flood is not credited as a producer on The Joshua Tree, his input was extraordinary. Achtung Baby, he was credited as a producer along with Eno, Lanois and [Steve] Lillywhite. Four producers seems to be the way for us, one for each member of the band. By the way, that's a joke. I think actually there's five on this one.

When we spoke a few months ago, you were critical of the production on 'Songs of Innocence,' saying it lacked "coherence," "should have been more raw" and that some of the songs worked better live. What did you do this time to make sure that didn't happen again?

Thomas Friedman in his book Thank You For Being Late speaks of how machines when they're put on pause cease productivity, but humans when they're put on pause begin a different kind of productivity. The pause on our album gave us a chance to play our songs live in the studio, strip them down to their bare essentials without any studio trickery to see what we really had. That was a great gift to the album even though in some cases we didn't want to run with the live feel, we learnt so much about the songs and that helped with cohesiveness.

On The Tonight Show you added lyrics to "Bullet the Blue Sky" that were unambiguously about Trump. Is that a sign you're going to become (even more) vocal about the dangers he poses to the world?

It is a little bit of a departure as I've always believed in working across the aisle as an anti-poverty activist but this isn't a matter of right or left. There's a bully on the bully pulpit and silence is not an option.

You've talked about how you want U2 to create joy in these insane times. Can you elaborate on that?

Unlike happiness, joy is one of the hardest human emotions to contrive for an artist but it is the mark of my favorite artists whether that be the Beatles, Prince, Beethoven, Oasis. It is life force itself. And I think something to do with the spilling over of gratitude for just being alive. Indeed as I think of it, Beethoven has his "Ode to Joy." The Supremes singing "Stop in the Name of Love" to me is one of the great anti-war songs. Although think it's about a lover's betrayal, the highness of the melody, the simplicity of the statement could be Ramones, could be Coldplay but I don't think there's anything more defiant than joy in difficult times. And the essence of romance is defiance. This is where rock & roll came in, this is what makes us useful. We must resist surrendering to melancholy for only the most special moments. That's a long way to say check our new single out, "You're the Best Thing About Me," it's kind of like punk Supremes.

What are the common themes that tie the songs on Songs of Experience together?

I try not to talk about William Blake too much because it sounds pretentious quoting such a literary giant but it was his great idea I pinched to compare the person we become through experience to the person who set out on the journey. If you're talking about innocence, you've probably already lost it but I do believe at the far end of experience, it's possible to recover it with wisdom. I'm not saying I have much of that but what little I have, I wanted to cram into these songs. I know U2 go into every album like it's their last one but even more this time I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt. So a lot of the songs are kind of letters, letters to Ali, letters to my sons and daughters, actually our sons and daughters.

There's a song called "The Showman" which is a letter to our audience, it's kind of about performers and how you shouldn't trust them too much. It's about me, haha. There's a funny line, well, I think it's funny anyway, "I lie for a living, I love to let on but you make it true when you sing along.?

It's like a Fifties Beatles-in-Hamburg type tune. There's a letter to America called "American Soul," Kendrick Lamar used a bit of this for "XXX" on his new album. And one that I didn't realize until too late that I was writing to myself, "It's the Little Things Give You Away." In all of these advice type songs, you are of course preaching what you need to hear. In that sense, they're all written to the singer. One other piece on Blake, I don't know if I'm explaining too much here but the best songs for me are often arguments with yourself or arguments with some other version of yourself. Even singing our song "One," which was half fiction, I've had this ongoing fight. In "Little Things," innocence challenges experience: "I saw you on the stairs, you didn't notice I was there, that's cause you were busy talking at me, not to me. You were high above the storm, a hurricane being born but this freedom just might cost you your liberty."

At the end of the song, experience breaks down and admits his deepest fears, having been called out on it by his younger, braver, bolder self. That same conversation also opens the album with a song called" Love Is All We Have Left." My favorite opening line to a U2 album: "There's nothing to stop this being the best day ever." In the second verse, innocence admonishes experience: "Now you're at the other end of the telescope, seven billion stars in her eyes, so many stars so many ways of seeing, hey, this is no time not to be alive." It's a chilling moment – in the chorus I was pretending to be Frank Sinatra singing on the moon, a sci-fi torch song "love, love is all we have left, a baby cries on the doorstep, love is all we have left." 

http://www.rollingstone.com

Bono at Forbes

GREATEST LIVING BUSINESS MINDS

To celebrate Forbes’ centennial,  the mag amassed an A-to-Z encyclopedia of ideas from 100 entrepreneurs, visionaries and prophets of capitalism—the greatest ever collection of business essayists and greatest ever portrait portfolio in business history, among them : Bono.

 ON ADVOCACY

BONO

Purpose-Driven Rock Star: Lead Singer, U2; Cofounder, One, (Red), Elevation Partners, Rise Fund

"Capitalism is not immoral, but it is amoral. And it requires our instruction. It's a wild beast that needs to be tamed, a better servant than master."

That's my philosophy with (RED), which partners with corporations to direct profits to fighting HIV/AIDS. The idea really came about after meeting with former Treasury secretary Bob Rubin, where he said, "You have to tell Americans the scale of the problem and what they can do about it. And you have to go about that like Nike does: They spend $50 million on ad campaigns." And I said, "Well, where are we going to get that kind of money?" And he said, "You're clever. You'll figure it out."

And we did. I realized that going to big companies and trying to break into their more modest philanthropy funds was a huge missed opportunity. It was their robust marketing and publicity budgets that we needed. Think of the creative minds in those departments -- the messaging is the most important thing in keeping an issue "hot," making it relevant. Fighting HIV is very difficult. Activists often demonize the corporate world. It's easy to do, but I think it's just foolishness to not recognize the creativity that you can unlock in the corporate world, together with the entertainment world. (RED) has so far generated nearly $500 million for the fight against AIDS, but the heat (RED) companies have created has also helped pressure governments to do their part -- and that's where the big money is, with donor governments spending $87.5 billion on HIV/AIDS since 2002. That's the reason we all do this!

Some of the most selfish people I've met are artists -- I'm one of them -- and some of the most selfless people I've ever met are in business, people like Warren Buffett. So, I've never had that clichéd view of commerce and culture being different. I always remember Björk saying to me that her songs, she feels, are like carpentry. Like her friends in Iceland, one of them designs a chair. Is that more beautiful or useful than a song? Well, it depends on the chair. Or the song. I've always seen what I do as an activist, as an artist, as an investor, as coming from the same place.

Great melodies have a lot in common with great ideas. They're instantly memorable. There's a certain inevitability. There's a sort of beautiful arc. Whether it's a song or business or a solution to a problem facing the world's poor, I see what I do as the same thing. I look for the topline melody, a clear thought. Now, my friends -- and sometimes my bandmates and sometimes my family -- would see this as multiple personality disorder. But for me, it's all the same thing.

https://www.forbes.com

The Edge on U2's 'Songs of Experience,' Bono's 'Brush With Mortality'

U2 guitarist the Edge explains how a major scare in Bono's life caused big changes to the band's new LP 'Songs of Experience.' Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

By Andy Green

The past three years have tested U2 in different ways, from the fierce backlash they received for gifting 2014's Songs of Innocence to every iTunes user to Bono's devastating bicycle accident, which left him with several fractured bones and a shattered left arm. But those setbacks didn't compare to another crisis Bono faced last year. "He had a brush with mortality," says the Edge, choosing his words carefully (the band won't go into detail on the matter). "He definitely had a serious moment, which caused him to reflect on a lot of things."

The episode caused the band to rethink Songs of Experience, a companion to Songs of Innocence that they had already been working on for more than two years. The resulting LP features less of the slick production that defined Innocence, in favor of a more classic formula: propulsive guitar rockers and ballads that look inward. "I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt," says Bono. "So a lot of the songs are kind of letters – letters to [my wife] Ali, letters to my sons and daughters."

The day after U2 played a show at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Edge called up Rolling Stone to talk about the long road to Songs of Experience and look ahead to next year's arena tour in support of the album. (We also conducted an extensive email interview with Bono that will be going up shortly.)

I see you guys debuted "You're the Best Thing About Me" last night. How did that go?

I wouldn't say it was the best we'll ever play it, but it was good. We hadn't played there recently and the crowd was really into it. I think it was one of the better shows.

You started Songs of Experience in 2014, and some of the shows go back even before that. The world has changed so much since then. How did those external factors change the focus and scope of the album?Mostly what we wanted to do was sit back and see how we felt about it coming out into a world that had taken a big lurch in a different direction. We weren't assuming we'd have to start again and, in fact, we didn't need to. The changes that occurred were predominantly lyrical, and in some cases they were quite subtle. A couple of songs subtly shifted to just sort of emphasize one aspect or better express what we were feeling and the ideas we wanted to put into it. But from a musical point of view, what happened with this delay, which was kind of amazing and great, is that we had all of the songs figured out and most of them recorded to the extent that they were releasable towards September of last year. But a year ago we were kind of feeling that we wanted to explore other production approaches and other ways the songs could be arranged and performed. We felt the band chemistry wasn't as represented as we thought it maybe ought to be.

So in the fall of last year we went back into a room as a band, initially without Bono and then he joined us for a couple of days at the end of the period, and we just played the songs. We played them with half an eye and ear to how they might be performed in a live concert setting. Part of the reason for doing that is that we always went through this kind of routine where we'd record own album, put it out and and then we'd start rearranging the songs live. Then our producers would show up halfway through the tour and they'd be like, "Oh, shit, man, that tune is sounding so cool now. I really wish we'd had that arrangement on the album." Steve Lillywhite used to say, "You guys should finish the album, go on tour with it, learn it, understand the songs fully, and then go back in the studio and re-record it in a week."

We didn't quite do that. We didn't get to perform in front of an audience, but by going back to the rehearsal space and then actually going back to the studio to re-record some of the songs we were able to find a synthesis of the raw band performances and some of the stuff we had created before. We'd sort of import keyboard performances and little ideas we liked from pervious versions and find a way to put them in. It became kind of the best of the band chemistry mixed in with the best of the 21st-century production technology. It's given it a more interesting aesthetic.

I spoke to Bono a couple of months ago and he said he felt thatSongs of Innocence lacked a coherence to the production and should have been more raw.There's this dichotomy to production standards these days where the music listener is used to really precise and simple, stripped-down arrangements so the inaccuracies of a band playing in a room where everything bleeds into everything else is not what's happening. It sounds, dare I say it, old-fashioned. We love when that works for us and we love that feel of people playing in a room, when it sounds fresh. But I think we're also wary of the fact that that sound is associated with 20, 30 years ago. We need to make sure, as we always have done, that we are part of a current conversation that's going in music culture in terms of production, songwriting, melodic structure, all the things that keep the culture moving forward.

What we don't want to be is caught in what I describe as a cultural oxbow lake where others are moving forward and you're still faithfully doing what you've always done, but now you're anachronistic and part of a historical form rather than what's actually pushing the boundaries forward, the flow of where it's going. We'll usually try to have our cake and eat it. We want it both: the hallmarks of the classic band, which is becoming more and more rare, but we also don't want to be perceived, and we don't want to be, a veteran act out of touch with the culture. It's a dance. It's a balance. If we allowed the album to be one extreme or another it would be wrong. It's finding that balance between what we do as a band naturally and then what we can still do in the studio. And the studio is still a songwriting tool for us and the production process is still a songwriting process as well as a production process.

I guess that balance is why you brought in so many different producers for this album.Yeah. I mean, they don't necessarily all work on every song. We ending up bringing in Steve Lillywhite, who we just had this wonderful relationship with in terms of getting in the room and working out arrangements and the minutiae of drum parts and guitar parts. Steve is just a wonderful facilitator for all of us go kind of get into ideas and refine our thing. We've also got Jacknife Lee, who we have worked with for many years. He's got this fascination with hip-hop production and he also works with guitar bands, so he has a foot in a couple of different camps.

Then you have Andy Barlow. He's a full on electronica and synthesizer producer that's not really used to bands or guitars, but he's amazing in other ways. Ryan Tedder is an amazing collaborator and his melodic sense is just so strong. When we're around Ryan these songs get better and better. The choruses get better. The hooks get better. The arrangements get more lean and more focused. And then Jolyon Thomas is a great state-of-the-art rock & roll producer in that he gets and loves bands. He gets and loves guitars, but at the same time what is the right guitar sound so you don't come across like you aren't right up to the minute. There are subtle things sometimes, just the difference between a White Stripes guitar sound and a Led Zeppelin guitar sound. In some ways it's a subtle thing, but in other ways they are worlds apart.

Is Steve your closer? Do you bring him in at the end to see it all out?Hmmm ... Yes and no. I think in this instance, it was more for the organic side of the record. He came in to work on that. At times, we had almost rival versions. We'd have a song like "The Blackout" where we almost had two versions of it. There would be a more organic version and then in a studio upstairs we had another version that was slightly more 21st century, slight more stripped down. We put the album together on a case-by-case basis. "Well, this one can be a little more organic because that one is a bit more processed and disciplined sonically." You probably noticed that the version of "You're the Best Thing About Me" that we released is quite different than the one we are playing live, and the final mix is like six weeks away.

How do you guys pick between songs? What is the process?The process is that we slowly sort of start to put the cornerstone songs in place and then we fill in around them and get clues about the overall identity of the record. For me, one of the breakthrough tune was "The Lights in Front of Me," which is now called "The Lights of Home." We had very rock & roll verses in it that sounded really great, but it was a little retro. We kind of knew it was in the running because we just loved it so much, and then Jacknife did a more stripped-down arrangement. The drums were sort of an open question, so Larry went in and played drums, so it had the discipline of a very contemporary production, but then with this amazing, very beautifully played human drum part on top of it. I think because it was recorded on its own it can kind of occupy the sound spectrum that it does. It still sounds really modern, but it almost sounds like it has a hip-hop influence or rather an R&B influence than a rock one. Anyway, those small little clues sometimes make you go, "OK, wow, that's the synthesis we're trying to achieve here."

In the case of "You're the Best Thing About Me," we were really excited about the mix we had six weeks ago. Then we started talking about how we were going to play it live and I went back to some early demos and found this one that had done at a point when we were experimenting with different arrangement ideas. It was an experiment we hadn't pursued and I thought, "This would be a good approach if we play it live," which we did on the Jimmy Fallon show. It's a fleshed-out approach with some new guitars.

Then Bono came into the studio to listen to it and was like, "OK, something is happening here. It's a better song now. I can't explain why, but I'm feeling something off this." So we kind of went off in a panic with us working furiously with two days to go before we had to turn the single in and get it to everybody for their consideration. We ended up agreeing that the simplicity, the rawness of it offers a counterbalance to the lyric and melody, which is very classic. It's a love song and it kind of takes it in a more convincing way. Somehow the song seems better - and it was totally last minute